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*Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen *is a charmingly old-school role-playing game, a reminder of simpler times. But it's also an interesting stop on the evolutionary journey of the Japanese RPG.

Originally released here in 1992 for the 8-bit Nintendo as Dragon Warrior IV, this fourth entry in Japan's most popular RPG series in great part sticks to the staples: Visit town, buy weapons, kill dungeon full of monsters, repeat. This makes the Nintendo DS remake of the game, 16 years on, a serious retro throwback. There are no big cinematic scenes, no elaborate gameplay mechanics – just a simple story told by munchkin 2-D characters who don't express emotion.

It's easy to miss, then, that *Dragon Quest IV *was in some ways a radical departure from the status quo.

Dragon Quest IV's designers – then and now (the original 1992 team and the DS remakers) – did have to be careful to not change the game too much. Dragon Quest games routinely sell millions of copies in Japan, not just to gamers but to adults and kids and grandparents, and they expect each new entry in the series to follow a predictable path. You start with a hero that you name, you're given a quest to grow stronger and slay monsters, and you save the world. The battle system has remained almost entirely static – it's a turn-based system where you select the actions of your entire team, then watch as a battle plays out. Vivid text descriptions of the battle tell you how things are going.

The casual observer might think this sounds like a description of every Japanese RPG. But consider Square Enix's other mainstay series,* Final Fantasy*. With each Final Fantasy title, the company has made changes to the main characters of the games, putting the player in charge of moody antiheroes or plucky athletes as the plot dictates. No such thing would ever fly in Dragon Quest; the Hero must in each case be a bright youngster with a sword and a thing for fighting dragons. Likewise the battle system: Each Final Fantasy game has a different one. No such thing happens with Dragon Quest.

With all this in mind, it's interesting how Dragon Quest IV's designers changed things up in this entry without violating the Sacred Principles. You begin IV by creating your hero, and you spend about five minutes or so wandering around in your hometown, talking with your parents and friends. But then, you jump to the game's first chapter, which is about a castle guard named Ragnar McRyan. And he, not the Hero, is the character through which you first experience the gameplay – exploring towns, talking to people, gathering information and finally entering a dungeon and killing some monsters.

After questing for less than two hours with Ragnar, you jump to an entirely new character, a princess named Alena. Her story is entirely separate from Ragnar's. None of the experience points or gold or equipment you gained during Ragnar's story transfer to Alena – you're starting from scratch again. This takes place twice more: IV's first four chapters are like little mini-RPGs of about two hours each in which you meet a new character, build them up a little bit, then start again.

In this way, IV's designers were able to experiment within the genre, getting away from the plucky-young-hero tropes that* Dragon Quest* had started and other RPGs were slavishly copying. The third chapter even featured a clever reversal of roles, putting the player in the shoes of an item shop manager named Torneko. The first few beats of his chapter put you behind the counter at a shop, selling weapons to adventurers who came in. Later, you'd go out and fight monsters to find new stock for your store.

Eventually – after about 10 hours – you take charge of the Hero you created, and travel the world partnering up with the characters from previous chapters. From there, things proceed as usual as your characters all travel together and work as a team. But the point is proven, in the most unlikely of places, that RPG characters don't necessarily need to slot into rigid archetypes.

That's why I find Dragon Quest IV fascinating. But that doesn't really answer the question of whether it works today, in remade form. The answer is that it depends on what you're looking for. I like remade retro RPGs like this: I enjoy the fast pace of the story – a necessity of old-school hardware limitations – and I prefer the simple battle systems that don't require me to be doing algebra every single turn trying to figure out what to do.

You constantly have some new goal or another to accomplish, and I like that each new plot point is not telegraphed by elaborate cinema scenes. Instead, it's all dealt with in plain old text boxes. I just wish they'd gone a little easier on the characters' accents, which are frequently of the "in Soviet Russia, dragon quests you" variety.

But that said, it's clear that not all remakes are created equal. Square Enix has just released a Nintendo DS remake of another RPG from the same era,* Final Fantasy IV*. This game has been given the full treatment, upgraded to look like a high-end DS product. Dragon Quest IV, on the other hand, is stuck halfway between then and now, with tiny 2-D sprites set on 3-D and 2-D backdrops.

It's tough to make the distinction between where Square Enix was deliberately preserving the game's nostalgic appeal, and where it was just cutting costs.

Either way, if you're looking for a game on the cutting edge of RPG technology, Dragon Quest IV is far from it. But if you're like me and you've grown apart from Japanese role-playing games the more overblown they've become, you might appreciate this speedy, back-to-basics style.